How much should an e-commerce website cost in 2015?

Many clients come to us with budgeting questions regarding e-commerce websites. When quoting an e-commerce website, we try our best to gauge the amount of hours it will take us given all the customizations needed. If a client needs a very plain ‘out of the box’ e-commerce site, in which they will add all the products and info, prices can be as low as $2500, but often times clients need customizations. So we lay out below some of those customization areas and the pricing ranges associated with each. Just keep in mind that these are generalizations and that they are not specific to any business.

Features and User Experience
This, by far, plays the biggest role in determining the price of an e-commerce website. For example, perhaps you want a membership based store or perhaps you want to allow customers to upload images and apply your products to them. Or maybe you want to add some type of reward system for making purchases on your site. All of these features require customizations, which in turn affects the price. How much? It really depends on what is needed. I would venture to say a range anywhere from $1,000 – $10,000 should cover most customizations.

Appearance Customizations
This is probably the second biggest factor to determining price. Responsive websites are definitely a must these days, but this would be even beyond that. It would be rearranging how the products are displayed, how the menu is displayed or even just simply moving things around on a product page. There is no “perfect” e-commerce software out of the box. Pricing wise, I would say there is a range of $1,000 – $5,000 depending on how many customizations need to be made.

Content Creation
Most of the time, our clients handle their own content creation of products, images, pricing, text, etc. But occasionally they may not have the resources or time to do it themselves. No worries, we can definitely take on this task, but it will take some of our time to do so. Pricing here can vary drastically. If you just need 25 products added, we may only charge $250. But if you need 1,000 products added, obviously that’s going to be much higher.

Payment Gateway Integration
Most of the popular gateways have already been integrated into our software, but if you perhaps want to use a local bank as your payment gateway, we may need to make some modifications to accommodate this. The pricing in this situation really depends on how easy your payment gateway is to work with and if we’ve already worked with them before. If we have already worked with them, it may only take a few hours to set it up. In the reverse scenario, we may have to research their API and make some customizations to get them implemented. So the price range could be as low as $250 and as much as upwards of $5,000.

Shipping Customizations
Shipping seems like it would be pretty straightforward and simple but it’s surprisingly not with a lot of clients. Some clients want to ship some products one way and others another way. Some people want to ship flat rate to other countries but have dynamic pricing in the US. Every business is different and that is why the shipping customizations play a factor here. If standard shipping using Fedex, UPS, or USPS works for your business, we won’t charge anything extra here. But if you need some custom shipping options like what we mentioned above, it could be roughly $2,500 – $5,000. It really depends on the situation.

In conclusion, you can easily see how a simple $2500 e-commerce website can turn into something much more when you add in all of the specifications needed. Are there any cheaper alternatives to a custom e-commerce solution? Absolutely. Shopify, Magento Go, GoDaddy, Wix, and many others have ‘do-it-yourself’ e-commerce solutions. However you are pretty limited on what you can do and limited on the appearance side as well. You give up some flexibility by saving on the cost.

Be sure to visit our e-commerce solutions page and we can recommend a solution that’s best for you!